Yeah, anarchy is a crazy idea. One wonders at the kind of peopele who would promote such a notion.
^^^^^ CB: Anarchy of production is definitely a crazy and stupid idea. Getting rid of the state is not.
^^^^^
CB:> As Marx says, the difference between us and animals is that we plan our
work
> before we do it.
B:Right and nobody in a capitalist economy plans anything. Everybody knows that.
^^^ CB: Comrade B ,this is a dishonest answer as is your first. You know well I mean planning "the economy" as a whole, not individual enterprises. You are being disingenuouos given all the discussions of this issue I know you have been in on these lists. Don't try to fake me by feigning ignorance of what I am mean and say here. ^^^^
CB: My point , as many times before, is that the seriousness of the
> "Internal" problems was due to the impact of the conduct of imperialism,
> especially the military attacks, which nobody can deny were the most
> horrible and largest in the history of humanity.
>
> I am saying straight out that but for the attacks by imperialism and the
> nuclear threat, the SU would be doing fine economically, as would all the
> other countries that started down the capitalist road.
B: Yeah, and then you can explain to us why China is chucking almost its entire state industry into the bin, as Russia did.
^^^^^ CB: Not clear at all that Chinese state doesn't have a Master Plan in all this, including in the way it relates to private corps, domestic and foreign.
^^^^
B: Also, it's good to know that the Soviet Union never started a war. The Afghans will be relieved to hear that.
^^^^^^ CB: Where did I say the Soviets didn't defend the socialist revolution in Afghan from reactionary bandits and terrorist contras acting as agents of U.S. imperialism ?
But yours is no reply to my claims regarding the imperialist wars and threats of war on the SU were the main cause of the fall of the SU, not centralized planning at all. That the Soviets defended progressive societ in Afghanistan is no argument at all that centralized planning was not in the least the cause of the Soviets' problems.
^^^^^^^
CB: > Most importantly here, the serious internal problems you refer to were
not> in the least due planning ! To claim the opposite is idiotic. If there
had
> been a market the serious problems would have been worse.
B: No it was not due to planning, it was due to "planning" without adequate information or an adequate way of testing the plans against what was really needed.
^^^^ CB: Right it was not due to planning per se , like I said. Some aspect was due to poor planning. But everything proceeds by trial and error. Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. That's materialism.
^^^^^^
>
> Far more important is a broader point, raised inter alia by Gramsci and
> Polanyi, that the organization of the economy is not everything, you also
> need civil society.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: In Hegel, civil society is the bourgeois economy, no ? Anyway, you'll
> have to argue it a bit more to claim that Russia didn't have one. Do you
> mean it only had a little capialism so it only had a little civil society
in
> the Hegelian sense ?
B: 1. In a formal sense, laws did not apply equally to citizens. Party officials were treated differently under the law.
^^^^^^
CB: In the U.S., Britain and France,etc. white people were treated differently than People of Color under the law. So, how are you saying that there was civil society in the capitalist countries, a la Wojtek, but there wasn't in the SU. In Britain , France , the U.S. etc. the bourgeoisie are the party members treated differently under the law than workers., etc., etc, etc. Inequality under the law is rife in bourgeois, "civil" society. So, surely this cannot be what Wojtek means by the "civil" society present outside of the SU that the SU needed. "Civil society" is not characterized by equality before the law. You must be kidding.
^^^^^^^
B: Ethnic minorities were treated differently under the law. People were judged by the content of their expressions and not the consequence of their actions, again, under the law. It was, in short, not law at all.
^^^^ CB: Are you talking about U.S. civil society ?
^^^^^^^^^
> CB: Lets not get carried away. Surely Lenin and Stalin sought to nurture
the > development of proletarian culture and society.
B: No, they sought to nurture the party.
^^^^^^ CB: You are getting carried away.
^^^^^^^
> The fact that this solution worked
> for a while - and worked quite well indeed - does not mean that the lack
of> civil society was not important. Actually it was - it was did the USSR
when
> central controls were dropped by Gorbachev.
>> But even within the central planning there serious problems with
information
> flow. The system needed good information to function efficiently, but did
> not have the apparatus to procure such information. It relied on
reporting
> by plant managers and local authorities - and these in the good old
Russian
> fashion pilfered whatever goodies they could and wrote false reports to
> cover that up. This is a well known thing not the US propaganda, that
> resulted in the so-called "taut planning" which introduced another
> systematic error into the planning process. The planners knew that plant
> managers were intentionally providing false reports and they tried to
> correct that by "guestimating" their actual capacity and needs.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Sure there were mistakes in planning, but not such that one would >
conclude that they should not have planned or , more importantly that
> planning was a cause of the serious problems. Planning was correct in>
principle.
B: No reasonable person, capitalist or socialist argues against "planning" and the idea that things "could have been planned for" is a tautology. Why weren't they planned for? You apparently have nothing to say on that topic (except, of course, that they could have been).
^^^^^^ CB: I apparently have something to say on the topic. Do you have a bad memory or something. They _did_ plan. You feign ignorance a lot here.
^^^^^^^^
B: Data. What data did they have and what did they use.
Decision model. What did they, in fact, prioritize and why?
Feedback. Did the system tend to perpetuate bad decisions or self-correct?
^^^^^
CB: Daydreaming here , are we ?
^^^^^
We should not draw the lesson from the failure of the SU that
> planning isn't the best future of human economy. We should draw the>
opposite conclusion. The history of the SU argues for planning of economies
> in the future. It supports the abolition of the market in the basic
economy.
> Small markets in an overall basicaLly planned economy is what follows from
> the experience of the SU. Also, just correct the errors you mention. Learn
> from experience, don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
B: That would be the conclusion if you ignored the results of Soviet finance - ultimately uncontrollable inflation expressed first in the black market and then in currency that progressively became worthless.
^^^ CB: No it would still be a conclusion. You just blithely started recounting the bath water as a seeming rationale for throwing out the baby, ignoring the content of what I just said.
^^^^
CB:> Another systemic problem was the informal economy - the pre-modern
social > relations carried over to the industrial age that sabotaged all
rational planning by nepotism, under the table deals, informal barters,
theft or
> informal "privatization" of public resources from widely spread shirking
to bribery and to theft.
^^^
B: Or, does the doling out of economic resources by a detached bureaucracy and legislature always tend to result in graft, corruption and uneconomic decision-making? One word for you: Abramoff.
^^^^ CB: One word for you : What ?
^^^^^
B: Unaccountable decision-makers make bad decisions. Capitalist economies are acountable to the capital markets. Soviet planners had little accountability except to each other. That creates inevitable corruption because objective, rational outside limits on behavior disappear and you get corrupt institutions.
^^^^ CB; Right one lesson from the SU experience is don't have unaccountable decision-makers. But "not to plan" is not a lesson from the SU experience
^^^^^
CB: > We do not know how well central planning would function in a society
that > actually had a functioning civil society that would keep these
socialdysfunctionalities under control. If Japan is any indication
(actually they
> have something quite close to central planning) - I would imagine that the
US would be a Soviet republic today. But it did not happen this way, and
> that is a reminder that economic system is not enough.
>
> CB: Agree. Yes, good point on Japan. The experience of the U.S. economy ,
> today, right now, makes more planning the obvious way to go.
B: I think it's fair to say that Japan has a culture of accountability that is second to none. Japanese are accountable to their fellow Japanese in ways that most people find difficult to understand and almost impossible to emulate. Add to that accountability to the marketplace and you have a pretty virtuous system. However, I don't think it's a model that translates well to a diverse society with many fewer areas of broad, social agreement.
More and better planning is always the way to go. The question is how to achieve it. For all its apparent anarchy, the Western capitalist system has achieved some pretty impressive results. I think it's amusing how little faith leftist "revolutionary" thinkers have in an anarchic system of consensus and how appealing they find the idea of the top-down, militaristic order of the planned economy.
^^^^^^ CB: The West planning is flawed by whom , what class, it plans for, in the main. The planning is to keep the rich rich. The anarchy of production is "for" those who suffer from the effects of the Absolute Genersl Law of Capitalist Accumulation.
^^^^^
I personally think that socialism can do better than capitalism at finding order in the apparent anarchy of radical democracy - but we have to have data and strong feedback mechanisms. I dare say it: We need finance.
Boddi
^^^^^
CB: Yea, socialism should have cost accounting, but that's part of planning.